Pub Date : 2023-06-18DOI: 10.1177/13540661231181989
Ty Solomon
How did the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement of 2020 resonate at a global level? And how did the ritual practices of the movement spread internationally? International Relations (IR) has seen increasing interest in the role of rituals in global politics, and the wider literature on rituals often explores their stabilizing effects while noting how rituals function by working on the collective emotions of participants. Yet what particular kinds of emotional processes lend rituals their power? And how do these ritual emotions disrupt prevailing power structures? This article proposes that conceptualizing these experiences as ritualized atmospheres opens up at least two new avenues for research on rituals, emotions, and global social movements in IR. First, ritualized atmospheres are characterized by their viscerally felt yet also intangible and diffuse features. These tensions offer an affective account of rituals’ often-noted constitutive dual pull between the materialization of political communities while also constructing them as emotionally charged abstractions. Second, the tensions and ambiguities of ritualized atmospheres can generate new horizons for thoughts and actions. Ambient shifts in collective mood can change what may be thought, said, and practiced within ritual contexts, allowing for new discourses and new forms of political action. The article pursues the question of BLM’s global resonance by way of developing these conceptual and empirical arguments.
{"title":"Up in the air: Ritualized atmospheres and the global Black Lives Matter movement","authors":"Ty Solomon","doi":"10.1177/13540661231181989","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231181989","url":null,"abstract":"How did the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement of 2020 resonate at a global level? And how did the ritual practices of the movement spread internationally? International Relations (IR) has seen increasing interest in the role of rituals in global politics, and the wider literature on rituals often explores their stabilizing effects while noting how rituals function by working on the collective emotions of participants. Yet what particular kinds of emotional processes lend rituals their power? And how do these ritual emotions disrupt prevailing power structures? This article proposes that conceptualizing these experiences as ritualized atmospheres opens up at least two new avenues for research on rituals, emotions, and global social movements in IR. First, ritualized atmospheres are characterized by their viscerally felt yet also intangible and diffuse features. These tensions offer an affective account of rituals’ often-noted constitutive dual pull between the materialization of political communities while also constructing them as emotionally charged abstractions. Second, the tensions and ambiguities of ritualized atmospheres can generate new horizons for thoughts and actions. Ambient shifts in collective mood can change what may be thought, said, and practiced within ritual contexts, allowing for new discourses and new forms of political action. The article pursues the question of BLM’s global resonance by way of developing these conceptual and empirical arguments.","PeriodicalId":48069,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of International Relations","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43199914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-08DOI: 10.1177/13540661231176990
Dr Jonna Nyman
Existing scholarship has demonstrated that theorising about security is Eurocentric. This leaves us with a partial account of the concept of security, which is presented as universal. This in turn generates explanatory problems because we are only seeing part of the picture. Yet there have been few attempts to move beyond critiques of Eurocentrism to examine the concept of security ‘elsewhere’. This paper takes China as its starting point, asking: what can looking at China tell us about security? In answering this question, the paper makes two contributions. First, it presents new empirical findings, building a conceptual history of security in China. Drawing on 140 key texts dating 1926–2022, the paper traces the emergence of the concept of security in China and its evolution through three explicit security concepts. Drawing on postcolonial insights it demonstrates that these concepts are hybrid, evolving out of multiple domestic and international influences. They have similarities as well as differences with the Eurocentric concept that dominates International Security Studies (ISS) and produce a discrete approach towards security that has been overlooked in a discipline that uses ‘Europe to explain Asia’. Second, considering these insights, the paper demonstrates that the universal concept of security that underpins theorising in ISS is partial and misleading. Differences in security concepts matter for theorising security and for understanding security policy. Consequently, I argue that we need to provincialize the concept of security: a truly global security studies is of necessity a provincial one attuned to difference and similarity.
{"title":"Towards a global security studies: what can looking at China tell us about the concept of security?","authors":"Dr Jonna Nyman","doi":"10.1177/13540661231176990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231176990","url":null,"abstract":"Existing scholarship has demonstrated that theorising about security is Eurocentric. This leaves us with a partial account of the concept of security, which is presented as universal. This in turn generates explanatory problems because we are only seeing part of the picture. Yet there have been few attempts to move beyond critiques of Eurocentrism to examine the concept of security ‘elsewhere’. This paper takes China as its starting point, asking: what can looking at China tell us about security? In answering this question, the paper makes two contributions. First, it presents new empirical findings, building a conceptual history of security in China. Drawing on 140 key texts dating 1926–2022, the paper traces the emergence of the concept of security in China and its evolution through three explicit security concepts. Drawing on postcolonial insights it demonstrates that these concepts are hybrid, evolving out of multiple domestic and international influences. They have similarities as well as differences with the Eurocentric concept that dominates International Security Studies (ISS) and produce a discrete approach towards security that has been overlooked in a discipline that uses ‘Europe to explain Asia’. Second, considering these insights, the paper demonstrates that the universal concept of security that underpins theorising in ISS is partial and misleading. Differences in security concepts matter for theorising security and for understanding security policy. Consequently, I argue that we need to provincialize the concept of security: a truly global security studies is of necessity a provincial one attuned to difference and similarity.","PeriodicalId":48069,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of International Relations","volume":"29 1","pages":"673 - 697"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43835318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-30DOI: 10.1177/13540661231176907
Alexander Stoffel, Ida Roland Birkvad
This paper identifies a common process of mystification within academic knowledge production today: the treatment of subordinated groups as mere metaphors or rhetorical figures for academic theorizing. We witness it when academics ask what trans might teach us about transnationality, when we are invited to reflect on what might be queer about modern warfare, or when nation-states are described as subaltern. Trans, queer, and subaltern populations are routinely fetishized within scholarship on the “traditional” International Relations concerns of statecraft, migration, security, and so on. This tendency serves a mystifying function by disabling scholars from examining the social relations that shape and organize their lives and histories. This paper proceeds in three parts. First, to understand the origins and logics of this self-mystifying process, this paper returns, via Stuart Hall, to Karl Marx’s methodological writings on abstraction. It contributes to the formalization of his methodology for contemporary IR scholarship by drawing a distinction between the fetishization of abstraction and the concretization of abstraction. Second, the paper explores how abstracted subject positions have been fetishized within three fields of international studies: trans studies, queer theory, and subaltern studies. Third, after elaborating a critique of this mystifying move, the paper outlines alternative approaches that instead seek to concretize the abstractions queer, trans, and subaltern by attending to their specific historical and social determinations. These strategies of demystification, we argue, carry forward a founding commitment of critical theory that is all too often abandoned within scholarly knowledge production today.
{"title":"Abstractions in International Relations: on the mystification of trans, queer, and subaltern life in critical knowledge production","authors":"Alexander Stoffel, Ida Roland Birkvad","doi":"10.1177/13540661231176907","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231176907","url":null,"abstract":"This paper identifies a common process of mystification within academic knowledge production today: the treatment of subordinated groups as mere metaphors or rhetorical figures for academic theorizing. We witness it when academics ask what trans might teach us about transnationality, when we are invited to reflect on what might be queer about modern warfare, or when nation-states are described as subaltern. Trans, queer, and subaltern populations are routinely fetishized within scholarship on the “traditional” International Relations concerns of statecraft, migration, security, and so on. This tendency serves a mystifying function by disabling scholars from examining the social relations that shape and organize their lives and histories. This paper proceeds in three parts. First, to understand the origins and logics of this self-mystifying process, this paper returns, via Stuart Hall, to Karl Marx’s methodological writings on abstraction. It contributes to the formalization of his methodology for contemporary IR scholarship by drawing a distinction between the fetishization of abstraction and the concretization of abstraction. Second, the paper explores how abstracted subject positions have been fetishized within three fields of international studies: trans studies, queer theory, and subaltern studies. Third, after elaborating a critique of this mystifying move, the paper outlines alternative approaches that instead seek to concretize the abstractions queer, trans, and subaltern by attending to their specific historical and social determinations. These strategies of demystification, we argue, carry forward a founding commitment of critical theory that is all too often abandoned within scholarly knowledge production today.","PeriodicalId":48069,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of International Relations","volume":"302 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135643164","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-25DOI: 10.1177/13540661231173553
Felix Anderl, Michael Hißen
Social movements see participation formats of international organizations (IOs) with suspicion. They increasingly retreat from cooperation to contest IOs from the outside, because they fear co-optation without real policy impact. However, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) was an exception to this trend because its opening up was seen as long-term dialogue facilitating discussions about the nature of food production, and because it created credible institutional mechanisms that were trusted by activists to give influence to farmers and peasant movements. Therefore, the food sovereignty movement participated within the FAO framework in a remarkably institutionalized way throughout the 2010s. But in 2019, when the United Nations (UN) announced to hold a food systems summit (United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS)), this changed dramatically. The food sovereignty movement, many non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and eventually scientists, decided to boycott the summit, instead organizing an alternative Peoples’ Summit, and withdrawing from long-held institutional roles in the FAO. How can this be explained? This article traces the process from the announcement of the UNFSS to its implementation, stressing how institutional trust was damaged by several decisions in the process that undermined the good faith of activists. As we show in detail, the circumvention of established institutional mechanisms, and the feeling of betrayal on the side of the movement, was decisive for losing institutional trust. Importantly, a mixture of substantive and institutional changes in the context of UNFSS not only undermined the movement’s trust into the integrity and ability of the summit organizers, but thereby also provoked movement efforts to delegitimize UN food governance at large.
{"title":"How trust is lost: the Food Systems Summit 2021 and the delegitimation of UN food governance","authors":"Felix Anderl, Michael Hißen","doi":"10.1177/13540661231173553","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231173553","url":null,"abstract":"Social movements see participation formats of international organizations (IOs) with suspicion. They increasingly retreat from cooperation to contest IOs from the outside, because they fear co-optation without real policy impact. However, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) was an exception to this trend because its opening up was seen as long-term dialogue facilitating discussions about the nature of food production, and because it created credible institutional mechanisms that were trusted by activists to give influence to farmers and peasant movements. Therefore, the food sovereignty movement participated within the FAO framework in a remarkably institutionalized way throughout the 2010s. But in 2019, when the United Nations (UN) announced to hold a food systems summit (United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS)), this changed dramatically. The food sovereignty movement, many non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and eventually scientists, decided to boycott the summit, instead organizing an alternative Peoples’ Summit, and withdrawing from long-held institutional roles in the FAO. How can this be explained? This article traces the process from the announcement of the UNFSS to its implementation, stressing how institutional trust was damaged by several decisions in the process that undermined the good faith of activists. As we show in detail, the circumvention of established institutional mechanisms, and the feeling of betrayal on the side of the movement, was decisive for losing institutional trust. Importantly, a mixture of substantive and institutional changes in the context of UNFSS not only undermined the movement’s trust into the integrity and ability of the summit organizers, but thereby also provoked movement efforts to delegitimize UN food governance at large.","PeriodicalId":48069,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of International Relations","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47464309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-19DOI: 10.1177/13540661231173858
Bernardo Teles Fazendeiro
Truth is as regularly invoked in International Relations (IR) as it is contested. Due to increased plurality, truth is no longer taken for granted, with some suggesting that relativism is on its way. At the same time, despite uncertainty as to the meaning of truth, research and factual verification persists, as findings remain hotly debated in IR, sometimes leading to entrenched, almost irreconcilable debates among scholars. This essay suggests that one way in which to bridge truth claims in the face of potential, albeit unwarranted, relativism is to distinguish between meaningful and factual truth. Factual truth is about assessing whether (raw) data qualifies as data at all, while meaningful truth – upon which most debates in IR are based – grounds our interpretation; it reveals reality’s various facets according to specific spatial and temporal concepts. Viewing conversations in IR as concerned with meaningful as opposed to factual truth allows scholars to lay relativism to rest. The essay also claims that conversations that confuse meaningfulness for factual verification – as in the debates between liberal institutionalists and structural realists in the 1990s – lead to scholarly entrenchment with no resolution in sight. Distinct temporal and spatial assumptions are often incompatible. As a result, such meaningful conversations are less about factual verifiability than about containing reification and enlarging the perspectives with which to exercise political judgement.
{"title":"The question of truth: how facts, space and time shape conversations in IR","authors":"Bernardo Teles Fazendeiro","doi":"10.1177/13540661231173858","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231173858","url":null,"abstract":"Truth is as regularly invoked in International Relations (IR) as it is contested. Due to increased plurality, truth is no longer taken for granted, with some suggesting that relativism is on its way. At the same time, despite uncertainty as to the meaning of truth, research and factual verification persists, as findings remain hotly debated in IR, sometimes leading to entrenched, almost irreconcilable debates among scholars. This essay suggests that one way in which to bridge truth claims in the face of potential, albeit unwarranted, relativism is to distinguish between meaningful and factual truth. Factual truth is about assessing whether (raw) data qualifies as data at all, while meaningful truth – upon which most debates in IR are based – grounds our interpretation; it reveals reality’s various facets according to specific spatial and temporal concepts. Viewing conversations in IR as concerned with meaningful as opposed to factual truth allows scholars to lay relativism to rest. The essay also claims that conversations that confuse meaningfulness for factual verification – as in the debates between liberal institutionalists and structural realists in the 1990s – lead to scholarly entrenchment with no resolution in sight. Distinct temporal and spatial assumptions are often incompatible. As a result, such meaningful conversations are less about factual verifiability than about containing reification and enlarging the perspectives with which to exercise political judgement.","PeriodicalId":48069,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of International Relations","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43915038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-19DOI: 10.1177/13540661231172294
Anna Finiguerra
Over the past decade, images of boats crossing or sinking in the Mediterranean have become extremely familiar to European publics. What is less familiar is the processes through which those boats are re-purposed, becoming artistic or even commodified goods once they reach a port of landing. Caught between being considered waste and valuable objects, these debris have been moved and re-purposed with scarce acknowledgement of the political work that these practices perform. This paper argues that practices of translation transform objects into waste or valuables and reveal crucial fault lines in the politics of migration – such as the limits of a politics of posthumous commemoration and the de-politicisation of border deaths. Translation works through a wide variety of professional practices and the assembling of value, which informs the staging of materials as waste or as valuables. By analysing the case of the art installation Barca Nostra, this article rethinks the role of migratory debris and the multiplicity of meaning attributed to them by highlighting how they must be read simultaneously as waste and objects of value to fully understand how practices of translation contribute to the de-politicisation of border deaths, leaving state violence in the Mediterranean unchallenged.
{"title":"A boat’s afterlife: multiple translations of migratory debris","authors":"Anna Finiguerra","doi":"10.1177/13540661231172294","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231172294","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past decade, images of boats crossing or sinking in the Mediterranean have become extremely familiar to European publics. What is less familiar is the processes through which those boats are re-purposed, becoming artistic or even commodified goods once they reach a port of landing. Caught between being considered waste and valuable objects, these debris have been moved and re-purposed with scarce acknowledgement of the political work that these practices perform. This paper argues that practices of translation transform objects into waste or valuables and reveal crucial fault lines in the politics of migration – such as the limits of a politics of posthumous commemoration and the de-politicisation of border deaths. Translation works through a wide variety of professional practices and the assembling of value, which informs the staging of materials as waste or as valuables. By analysing the case of the art installation Barca Nostra, this article rethinks the role of migratory debris and the multiplicity of meaning attributed to them by highlighting how they must be read simultaneously as waste and objects of value to fully understand how practices of translation contribute to the de-politicisation of border deaths, leaving state violence in the Mediterranean unchallenged.","PeriodicalId":48069,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of International Relations","volume":"29 1","pages":"628 - 650"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46726348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-19DOI: 10.1177/13540661231173866
Deepa Nair
This article takes the study of populism beyond political parties and individual leaders and foregrounds coalitions in the making and unmaking of populist projects. It compares Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency in the Philippines with figures of an older vintage in postcolonial Southeast Asia—the Cold War neutralists President Sukarno of Indonesia and Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, neither of whom fit neatly within dominant frameworks of populism in International Relations (IR). Drawing on Rogers Brubaker’s conceptualization of populism as a “discursive and stylistic repertoire,” I argue that the projects of Duterte, Sukarno, and Sihanouk embody populism in general and are suggestive of a distinct type vis-à-vis right- or left-wing party and individual populists. Specifically, these are populists who presided over ideologically diverse coalitions in contexts of intrusive Great Power competition. This comparison advances the study of populism in IR in three ways. First, rather than populist political parties and leaders, this article focuses on populists crafting coalitions in contexts of weak party milieus. Second, it draws on a capacious conceptualization of populism (as repertoire) which pushes beyond exclusively “ideological,” “strategic,” and “discursive” conceptions and better accounts for the empirical diversity of this phenomenon outside Euro-American shores. Third, this article highlights a novel pathway by which international politics shapes the fates of populism. The three cases show how a strident discourse of anti-colonialism glued populists’ diverse coalitions at home, while populists’ external alignment choices and efforts to steer “independent” foreign policies exacerbated coalitional fault lines, straining, if not unraveling, their projects.
{"title":"Populists in the shadow of great power competition: Duterte, Sukarno, and Sihanouk in comparative perspective","authors":"Deepa Nair","doi":"10.1177/13540661231173866","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231173866","url":null,"abstract":"This article takes the study of populism beyond political parties and individual leaders and foregrounds coalitions in the making and unmaking of populist projects. It compares Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency in the Philippines with figures of an older vintage in postcolonial Southeast Asia—the Cold War neutralists President Sukarno of Indonesia and Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, neither of whom fit neatly within dominant frameworks of populism in International Relations (IR). Drawing on Rogers Brubaker’s conceptualization of populism as a “discursive and stylistic repertoire,” I argue that the projects of Duterte, Sukarno, and Sihanouk embody populism in general and are suggestive of a distinct type vis-à-vis right- or left-wing party and individual populists. Specifically, these are populists who presided over ideologically diverse coalitions in contexts of intrusive Great Power competition. This comparison advances the study of populism in IR in three ways. First, rather than populist political parties and leaders, this article focuses on populists crafting coalitions in contexts of weak party milieus. Second, it draws on a capacious conceptualization of populism (as repertoire) which pushes beyond exclusively “ideological,” “strategic,” and “discursive” conceptions and better accounts for the empirical diversity of this phenomenon outside Euro-American shores. Third, this article highlights a novel pathway by which international politics shapes the fates of populism. The three cases show how a strident discourse of anti-colonialism glued populists’ diverse coalitions at home, while populists’ external alignment choices and efforts to steer “independent” foreign policies exacerbated coalitional fault lines, straining, if not unraveling, their projects.","PeriodicalId":48069,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of International Relations","volume":"29 1","pages":"723 - 750"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41807174","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-11DOI: 10.1177/13540661231168773
Deborah Barros Leal Farias
There is significant and growing interest in better understanding hierarchy in the international system, especially in relation to intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Acknowledging the existence of hierarchy in a system implies that there are different social positions (higher/lower), but not why or how a specific differentiation came to be used, nor how it is structured, contested or resolved. This article is interested in contributing to these questions, particularly in the context of heterarchical settings (where more than one hierarchy is present), which is also not fully understood. It uses the first years of the International Labour Organization (ILO) as a springboard to reflect upon hierarchy within the so-called ‘civilized’ group of countries in the immediate aftermath of World War I. This IGO was the first to (1) introduce statistical data to rank countries, with criteria designed to ‘objectively’ gauge industrial power and (2) establish a geographic allocation of countries in its main decision-making body’s structure. Non-European countries and non-great powers had critical roles in establishing these novel ways of dealing with hierarchies and their institutional design in IGOs. One hundred years later, these discussions still resonate with several ongoing cases of contestation in IGOs over ‘fair’ hierarchical structures.
{"title":"Multiple hierarchies within the ‘civilized’ world: country ranking and regional power in the International Labour Organization (1919–1922)","authors":"Deborah Barros Leal Farias","doi":"10.1177/13540661231168773","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231168773","url":null,"abstract":"There is significant and growing interest in better understanding hierarchy in the international system, especially in relation to intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Acknowledging the existence of hierarchy in a system implies that there are different social positions (higher/lower), but not why or how a specific differentiation came to be used, nor how it is structured, contested or resolved. This article is interested in contributing to these questions, particularly in the context of heterarchical settings (where more than one hierarchy is present), which is also not fully understood. It uses the first years of the International Labour Organization (ILO) as a springboard to reflect upon hierarchy within the so-called ‘civilized’ group of countries in the immediate aftermath of World War I. This IGO was the first to (1) introduce statistical data to rank countries, with criteria designed to ‘objectively’ gauge industrial power and (2) establish a geographic allocation of countries in its main decision-making body’s structure. Non-European countries and non-great powers had critical roles in establishing these novel ways of dealing with hierarchies and their institutional design in IGOs. One hundred years later, these discussions still resonate with several ongoing cases of contestation in IGOs over ‘fair’ hierarchical structures.","PeriodicalId":48069,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of International Relations","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48232168","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-11DOI: 10.1177/13540661231170731
Kira Huju
This article sketches out the social rules for belonging among the ‘cosmopolitan elite’ at the geopolitical margins of international society. It does so by analysing an awkward balancing act performed by career diplomats of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS): even as Indian diplomats contest Western political hegemony and its attendant ideologies, they perpetuate social behaviours that signal a desire to be recognized as elite members of a Westernized diplomatic club, in whose hierarchies of race and class they hope to ascend. Cosmopolitanism operates in this balancing act not as a world-embracing ethic upholding an equal, pluralistic, or liberal international order but as an elite aesthetic which presumes cultural compliance and social assimilation into Westernized mores. If it once was European powers who employed a colonial ‘standard of civilization’ to legitimate their dominance over those whose social practices they judged inferior (Buzan, 2014), in a formally postcolonial order, Indian diplomats themselves have come to employ elite performances of cosmopolitanism as a kind of civilizational standard. This standard is continually enacted to secure one’s status as a worthy participant of a white,
{"title":"The cosmopolitan standard of civilization: a reflexive sociology of elite belonging among Indian diplomats","authors":"Kira Huju","doi":"10.1177/13540661231170731","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231170731","url":null,"abstract":"This article sketches out the social rules for belonging among the ‘cosmopolitan elite’ at the geopolitical margins of international society. It does so by analysing an awkward balancing act performed by career diplomats of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS): even as Indian diplomats contest Western political hegemony and its attendant ideologies, they perpetuate social behaviours that signal a desire to be recognized as elite members of a Westernized diplomatic club, in whose hierarchies of race and class they hope to ascend. Cosmopolitanism operates in this balancing act not as a world-embracing ethic upholding an equal, pluralistic, or liberal international order but as an elite aesthetic which presumes cultural compliance and social assimilation into Westernized mores. If it once was European powers who employed a colonial ‘standard of civilization’ to legitimate their dominance over those whose social practices they judged inferior (Buzan, 2014), in a formally postcolonial order, Indian diplomats themselves have come to employ elite performances of cosmopolitanism as a kind of civilizational standard. This standard is continually enacted to secure one’s status as a worthy participant of a white,","PeriodicalId":48069,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of International Relations","volume":"29 1","pages":"698 - 722"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41544069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-29DOI: 10.1177/13540661231169165
Kimberly Hutchings
This article examines the meaning and implications of doing epistemic justice in the study of International Relations through the prism of the recovery of the international thought of Fannie Fern Andrews and Amy Ashwood Garvey and in dialogue with feminist epistemology. It argues that doing epistemic justice involves going beyond restorative justice for excluded voices in which the historical record is set straight, inclusionary justice in which previously excluded voices are added to disciplinary conversations, and transformative justice, in which the perspectives of the marginalised and oppressed become sources of epistemic authority and new knowledge. Over and above all of these things, doing epistemic justice entails practising a particular kind of epistemic collective responsibility, which actively and reflexively recognises and engages with power-laden relations between knowers, worlds and audiences in the production of international thought, then and now.
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